


Incremental

by ivory_leigh



Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Fluff, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Slow Burn, Soulmate-Identifying Marks
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-08-16
Updated: 2017-09-09
Packaged: 2018-12-15 23:45:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,799
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11816721
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ivory_leigh/pseuds/ivory_leigh
Summary: Where other people have a name printed in black calligraphy, Baze Malbus has a wrist full of scars and a heart too big to hold them, desperate to find his place in a world that wasn't built for him. He isn't sure if he believes in soulmates. Until he meets Chirrut Imwe, he isn't sure if he believes in anything at all.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> For @polarcell, who requested Baze being a big softie and a soulmate au where the characters have to work for their happy ending. This is an ongoing fic, so be sure to check back in!

Baze Malbus grew up on the stories, the romances, the fairy tales of people who had found their destiny in each other’s arms. He loved to listen to his mother tell them to him, just a whisper in the darkness as she rocked him to sleep at night, her voice a tender lullaby, her words almost lost to the sound of the city outside.

“Your grandmama found her soulmate when she was fifteen,” she’d say, and Baze would watch the way the firelight moved across her face, painting her eyes and lips with gold. “She was born with a name on her wrist all written in Mando’a, and when a boy with that name took up working on her daddy’s boat, she didn’t even know it. For years and years he worked and lived with them, and she had no idea that it was his name written on her in this language she couldn’t understand.”

“How did she find out?” he would ask, right on cue, because he loved to hear her tell the story no matter how many times he’d heard it before. “How did she finally realize that they were soulmates?”  

“Well,” she’d start, with the relish of a storyteller. “One day, late in the summer of the year she turned sixteen, she fell from the prow of her father’s boat. Right into the ocean, she went, and this boy, Susek Anor Krek, he jumped right in after her, no hesitation at all. He grabbed her and swam her back to the boat, laid her out on the deck and got all the salt water out of her lungs, just about saved her life. And when she opened her eyes she saw it. Her name on his arm, written in the Clarimon she’d learned as a child. That’s how she knew they were soulmates.”

“Have you found your soulmate, mama?” he would ask her, even though he already knew the answer. His mother had never hidden it from him, the fact that his father was a soldier who had taken her as prisoner, the fact that in all her life she had never been in love. But the question always made her chuckle, made the joy inside her spark bright as she pushed the dark, curling hair out of her eyes.

“No, darling,” she would say, her voice gone soft, gone honey-sweet. “But do you know what?”

“What?”

“I found you.” And she would lean down and kiss him over and over again until he giggled with it, her skin warm against his, the feel of her smile so solid in his memories that it lasted long after she had ceased to exist. “Now go to sleep, _bao bao_. We have a lot of work to do in the morning and you’re going to need all your strength.”

For a while, that was enough. For a while, Baze didn’t question why he had no name on the tender inside of his wrist, no word under his skin gone soft-edged with age. For a while he didn’t question why all the other children in the village spent their time comparing letters and languages, trying to teach themselves to read the name of their soulmate while Baze was left with nothing but a handful of scars. His mother would kiss his wrist sometimes, tell him he was perfect, tell him the Force had made him just exactly how he needed to be, and for a while, that was enough.

He was seven years old when he finally asked her, when the sting of differentness and isolation had finally begun to hurt. “Mama,” he’d said, while she was standing at the stove making supper. He was clutching his arm, the memory of the other boys’ laughter still fresh and prickly in his memory, a pain he was only just beginning to understand. “Mama, why don’t I have a soulmate?”

His mother paused, sighed, set down her ladle, and when she turned toward him she looked as though she’d been wondering how to answer this question for a very long time. “Baze…”

“All the other kids do. The boys that I play with, and the girls, and the elders. It’s just me that hasn’t got one, and I don’t know—” He stopped, swallowed hard around the achiness that had suddenly lodged in his throat, a question he’d never dared to ask before poised on the tip of his tongue. “Am I not good enough?” he whispered, and he started to cry very quietly, his mouth tight with pain. “Mama, does the Force not want me to fall in love?”

“No,” she said, kneeling down, white apron on the packed earth floor. “No, no, Baze, that’s not it at all. You’re just different. Everybody’s different.”

“Then why—”

“Look at me.” She took his face in her hands and wiped away the water that gathered under his eyes, pressed her thumbs against his cheeks and held him gently, let him cry into her calloused palms. “Everybody in the galaxy is exactly the way they’re meant to be, Baze, perfect in every single way. Do you think the stars that put you together made a mistake?”

“Sometimes,” Baze sniffled, and when he looked up his mother was smiling and there was firelight flickering over the tears in her eyes.

“Baze Malbus,” she said, and she picked him up gently, his head on her shoulder, his breath hitching against her breast. “Baze Malbus, you are the most wonderful, beautiful thing the Force has ever made. Nothing about you is a mistake.”

“I just,” he started, and the next word was lost in a sob, his face buried in her hair. “I don’t _understand!_ Why wouldn’t the stars build me to be loved?”

“Do you know what that is?” she asked, pointing out the window, and Baze looked up, looked at the way the red-gray orb of their planet had gone blurry with tears.

“NaJedha,” he answered, voice catching on the last syllable. His mother took a few steps forward, pointed to a different spot of light.

“And that one?”

“Rakada Prime.”

“And that big river of stars just behind it? What’s that?”

“The Namadii Corridor.”

“Baze, darling,” she murmured, “don’t you see how big the galaxy is? it's big and fragile, and mysterious, and if everyone met their soulmate on the first try there wouldn’t be enough love to get through all of it. Everyone would just find their one person and settle down and never bother looking at nobody else again, and that’s just not how it’s meant to be. We need to love lots of people at lots of times for lots of reasons, and if you never find your soulmate, well, you’re still going to be okay.”

“Is that why I don’t have a name?” Baze asked, clinging to her, studying the sea of planets he would never visit all spread out across the sky like spilt wine. “So that I can love lots of people instead of just one?”

His mother laughed and kissed him, leaned him up against her hip. “Yes, _bao bao,_ I think that’s why. And do you know what?”

“What?”

She turned to look at him, her face lighted by NaJedha on one side and the firelight on the other, and forever after Baze would remember her like that, beautiful, ethereal—something that he never quite knew how to name. “When two people are meant to be together,” she said, and she leaned her forehead against his, her skin gone to shades of burgundy and bronze. “ _Really_ meant to be together, forever and ever and ever, the Force always manages to find a way.”

Whatever else happened in his lifetime, whatever great griefs and triumphs moved through him, some part of Baze would never stop believing that.

The Force would find a way.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Baze was eleven years old and already everything the Republic needed, able-bodied and sturdy-shouldered, disposable, expendable. Afraid. Boys like him had a tendency to turn up missing in the middle of the night, shipped off to some strange subsector planet between one morning and the next. He was beginning to realize that he could flee into the temple or resign himself to a lifetime of war.

Baze would tell his life story sometimes, when he was drunk enough or lonely enough, when he needed to comfort himself with words he knew. It would change a bit from telling to telling but it would always start the same way, with a seven-year-old boy wide eyed and trembling and asking the question that would haunt him for the rest of his life, asking, Why wasn’t I built for love? 

He never did get an answer, and by the end of his eleventh winter, Baze had learned to stop asking the question out loud. His mother would just tell him to put his trust in the Force and, for her sake, he would try. He would pray at the altars, burn the incense, leave the offerings. He would try to ignore the sneaking suspicion that there were a lot of things in the world that the Force just didn’t know how to fix, the way it didn’t do anything about the scars on his arm or the occupation that was slowly forming on their doorstep.  

That was the year the Republic began to gather its forces in fear of impending war, clone troopers and jedi knights all edging their way into Jedha’s little subset of space, setting up checkpoints and transport stations, investigating the owner of every speeder that happened to pass by. The troopers were bad, with their white armor and hidden faces and every hint of their former identities gone, but the jedi—the jedi were worse. The jedi allowed it to happen, watched every shakedown and pushback with the kind of impassivity Baze could never dream of, lightsabers clipped to their belts, untouched. He heard the stories of clone troopers raping women and burning villages and sometimes, sometimes he believed them. Sometimes he wondered where the Force was leading them all to. 

That, he would say later, was the reason he wound up in the temple: his cynicism worried his mother. She didn’t want him to wind up a non-believer the way his father had been, and then he would pause in his re-telling and laugh out loud and say, “A whole lot of good that did us.” He was still a non-believer. He still left the temple. He still watched his world burn. 

But the truth was much darker, much colder. It settled in his bones if he thought about it too much, left him shivering in its wake because the truth was that there was already more of his father in him than his mother knew what to do with, hidden all the way down in the depths of his soul. The truth was that there was so much love and rage pent up inside him, so much frustration and sadness and he didn’t know where to put it all, didn’t know how his hands could be so full and so empty at the exact same time. He would pick fights, punch walls. He would threaten the boys who laughed at his scraped-up arm, come home bloody and bruised and split-lipped, crying, pretending that nothing ached inside him like the loss of something he did not know how to name. 

He was eleven years old and already everything the Republic needed, able-bodied and sturdy-shouldered, filled with something that could drive him to kill a man if he didn’t keep it all in check. He was lonely. He was afraid. He had no name upon his wrist that might somehow tie him back to the family he’d been torn from, no lover who would come searching for him all the length of the stars. In a world of soulmates he was disposable, expendable, and boys like him had a tendency to turn up missing in the middle of the night, shipped off to some strange subsector planet between one morning and the next. People didn’t talk about it, didn’t ask. That’s just how things went: girls were sold into slavery, and boys were sold into war. 

And his mother—Force save his mother, she loved him, still. She loved him even when his heart was spilling over at the edges, even when he cried or trembled, even when he looked at her with his father’s night-dark eyes. She loved him even though she knew he was destined for the kind of violence she’d spent her whole life trying to heal, and whenever he got into another fight she would go on trying to heal it all, bandaging his knuckles, wrapping up what was left of his battered soul. Baze loved her. He  _ adored _ her. He was afraid he might break her one day.

It was late winter when he finally decided, eleven years old and sitting on a straw mattress much too small for him, watching his mother sew. “Mama?” he asked, watching her hand moving slowly, in and out and in and out, over and over again. 

“Mm?” 

“What do you think about me becoming an acolyte?” 

She stopped with a suddenness that surprised him, needle gleaming from between her fingers and the folds of her favorite dress, the fabric gone soft and gray with washing. “What?” 

“An acolyte,” he said again, a little uncertainly. “Like, at the temple. They’re always looking for new members, and I know it doesn’t pay anything but then you wouldn’t have to buy me food at the market, or, or new clothes every spring. It’s not much, but then maybe you could finally patch up the roof that’s been leaking—” 

She blinked at him and her eyes were different than he’d ever seen them, dark like his eyes were dark, and frightened the way his heart was frightened. “Baze,” she said, “we’ve made it through the worst of the winter. We don’t need to worry about the roof anymore.” 

“We did.” His throat ached with the words, with the thought of leaving her alone in the world again but he closed his eyes, saw the white armor of the troopers shining in the sun. “We made it through the worst of the winter, but the seasons don’t care that there’s a war going on.” 

“Baze…”  

“Mama, I’m getting to be grown up now. I’m big enough to go out on my own.” He paused, looked down at his hands that were worn and scabbed and dangerous sometimes and said, “I’m big enough for them to take me away.” 

“I wouldn’t let that happen,” his mother whispered. “Oh, darling, I wouldn’t let that happen. I’d  _ die _ before I let them take you away.” 

“I’m afraid of them.” He swallowed against the familiar sting of tears and shook his head, corrected himself. “I’m afraid of  _ me.”  _

His mother watched him, her face uncertain, pained. He tried to find the courage in him, said a silent prayer that if the Force was guiding him it shouldn’t fail him now. “I’m bad. I’m mean and I hurt people and I’m afraid that—I’m afraid that if the Republic gets its hands on me I’ll wind up just like my father did.” 

His mother stood up and walked over to his little bed, pushed him gently to the side with a soft, “Scooch on over.” He made room for her and she sat down beside him, her perfume faded down until he could smell the lingering underscent of sweat and rainwater and generator grease. He leaned in close to her, put his head against the broad plane of her shoulder. 

“Mama.” 

“I don’t know where you get these ideas from,” she said, and she reached a hand up to comb through his ragged hair. “You’re nothing like your father, Baze. Don’t let anyone tell you that you are.” 

“But I’m his son.” 

“You’re  _ my _ son,” she said, “and you’re perfect. And if there’s a meanness in you then it’s because the Force put it there, not because you’ve got some bad blood running through your veins.” She paused, watching him. “You are getting big though.” 

“Ashanji said I’m as big as a bantha now.” 

“Mmm. Ashanji certainly knows her banthas.” She took a deep breath and pulled him against her his head against her breast, her heartbeat quiet and rhythmic in his ears. He could feel her hands in his hair, clutching him close. “And I suppose boys as big as banthas ought to allowed to make their own decisions.”

“I’d be safe there,” Baze whispered. His head moved in time with her breathing. “In the temple. And I’d write you letters and I’d come back to visit you all the time. I’ll even help with the harvest in the fall.” 

She sighed a little, her hand slipping down to touch his ears, his face, the delicate skin beneath his eyes. “ _ Bao bao, _ ” she said, and there were tears in her voice. “Baze. My treasure. I knew you’d have to leave me one day, but I just didn’t think one day would be so damn  _ soon _ .” 

He didn’t answer her. There wasn’t really very much to say. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I deleted the update schedule because frankly y'all don't need to know the extent to which I'm lying to myself. So... just bear with me here.
> 
> We'll meet Chirrut in the next chapter!


End file.
